DNA
by amandajbruce
Summary: It's like one of the strands of her very own DNA has betrayed her, changing into a connected thread between the two of them without her consent.


**A/N: A fifteen minute challenge for the term DNA. Probably a little more than fifteen minutes because I was watching an episode of Leverage while writing. It's just a drabble. Nothing really fancy, and not edited. But it was the first thing that came to mind, so I wrote until I couldn't write anymore.**

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There are those few things in your life that once you come across them, they become ingrained in your very DNA. It might not be immediate, maybe they find a way to worm their way in, or maybe they start off small and multiply in the very bits of you that make you who you are. But sometimes, the change is immediate.

As a scientist, she doesn't really believe that, of course. Something from the outside can't really become such a part of you. Unless it's a parasite. But parasites can be removed. This is different. She knows it's illogical. But it's there all the same. She knows from the moment she meets him, running into him outside one of the classes at The Academy when they are both the youngest recruits in SHIELD history. She doesn't know how everything shifts in that one moment; she just knows she's different.

It's like something in her reaches out to something in him and fastens itself to his core. It's like one of the strands of her very own DNA has betrayed her, changing into a connected thread between the two of them without her consent. She _can't_ explain it. She knows in that moment that she would do anything for him, whether he asked her to or not.

She tries to reason it away with how much he reminds her of her life back home, being around him makes her a little less homesick. And then when they start working together on their very first paired assessment, she decides she must have simply subconsciously known that they would make great academic partners. Working with him is both challenging and familiar – like a perfect fit between a wheel and axel. She doesn't know if she's the wheel or the axel, but she knows that both parts have to be in perfect condition to stay in working order. So she makes it her mission to keep everything, including him, in tip top shape.

When he experiences stress, she DVRs strange documentaries about apes and monkeys that he can't get enough of. When he misses his mum's cooking, she whips up a traditional English meal as best she can. When he worries that one professor or another might get the best of him, she suggests they quiz one another until they both know the information backwards and forwards. When he seems burnt out on an experiment and she knows he needs a break, but won't admit it, she feigns exhaustion and suggests they relax with an episode or two of _Doctor Who. _And when he is too scared of change, but she knows how much he has to offer, she convinces him that they could better serve the organization as field agents. She pushes and pulls, and she keeps the wheel turning.

And she allows him to push and pull as well. If she's had a particularly bad day, he makes her favorite tea, and he knows just how she takes it, even if she can't remember ever telling him. When an experiment goes awry, he offers to make a thorough review of her data to see where her ideas broke apart. When she's feeling particularly stressed, he grabs tickets to one of her favorite museums for the day. When she worries that she isn't good enough to be a SHIELD agent, that there are too many gaps in her abilities, he reminds that her marks outrank everyone else at the Academy, even him. And when she stares at him with desperate eyes across a lab table, telling him all the reasons they can't give in to fear, and they should take this opportunity in the field, he says yes.

They've barely been in the field at all when she feels the pull between them again. She's sick with an alien virus, something she can't fix that could kill her entire team, including him. So to save him, to keep him and the rest of the team alive, she jumps out of a plane. She jumps to what she thinks will be her death, and it doesn't occur to her that the strand of her DNA that has somehow managed to unravel and reach out to him has to have found something to attach to, that maybe when she's falling through the sky, he feels the pull too.

Maybe, it wasn't just her DNA that changed. Maybe there's a strand of his that has unraveled and reached out to her as well. Maybe he's been fundamentally changed too. He's never been much of a life science kind of a guy, mechanics have always been his thing, but even he knows that DNA can't really be changed. Science hasn't quite caught up to that kind of thing yet. But she has most definitely changed him.

He's always been content to hide at the back of the room, quiet and unnoticed, not making a fuss, staying out of the way of the fight. He learned early on in life that staying out of the way of the boisterous and the larger than life crowds was safer. But she has him careening wildly on dance floors and yelling at the top of his lungs when he disagrees with her. And he's never felt more alive. It's like his very cellular makeup has been infused with some of her energy. She makes him _more _than he was before.

So he feels the pull too. Both figuratively and literally. He feels it when she tethers herself to him before they blow a hole in the side of the plane to stop the bad guys. They start out tethered to other team members as well, but in the end, it's just the two of them, and a piece of technology between them stretched along elastic and buckles. He feels the chords cut into his chest, bruising his ribs, cutting off the circulation. And he wouldn't have it any other way. With the roaring air around them, the pressure intent on sucking everything out into the clear blue, he feels like he's anchoring her, holding her to reality. And she's holding him.

Even when they aren't actually strapped together, he feels it. It's pulled taught, his heart reaching out to her as she steps off the cargo deck into the clouds. It's bruising his ribs when the ghost of a man has a knife to her neck. And it's cutting off his circulation when she takes a dendrotoxin grenade on his behalf. And it isn't just when her life is in danger either. If it were, he could put it down to just worrying about her safety like he would any other member of the team he has come to know so well.

No, when he falls asleep on the sofa in the lounge without her, he still feels a phantom pain in his arm where her head should have been. When he works in the lab while she's outside on the phone with her parents, he still finds himself stepping around her station to avoid running into her invisible form. When he makes tea because he can't sleep at night, he always makes enough for two. He can't help it. She's there, in everything he does, and he can't change himself back. He can't fully remember what he was like before she changed him.

No, DNA can't be well and truly changed. It's immutable. Scientifically impossible. But it's an indisputable fact that they are different. They feel it in their bones, in their blood, in the very fibers of their beings. They are, if not scientifically, then cosmically, connected now. And they're both fairly sure there's nothing they can do to change that now.

-o-


End file.
